Web has doubled in two years

02-11-2006

by Charlie Taylor

The internet reached a new milestone on Thursday when it was revealed there are now more than 100 million websites in existence.

According to the latest figures from Netcraft, an internet monitoring firm which has been measuring website growth since 1995, there are currently 101,435,253 websites with domain names and content on them online, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

The recent rise in live websites is attributed to an explosive growth in the use of weblogs (blogs) and an increase in the number of small businesses launching their own websites.

Netcraft said that 2006 has proven to be an "extraordinary year" for the internet with some 27.4 million new websites coming into being since January. This easily surpasses last year's full-year record when 17 million new sites went online for the first time.

The latest figures show just how quickly the internet has grown since 6 August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee released the internet protocol (IP) concept on which the present-day net still mainly relies upon.

In effect, the internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

In August 1995, when Netcraft began measuring online content, there were just 18,957 websites, a figure that rose to one million by April 1997. In February 2000 it was revealed that the 10 million milestone had been passed and the number of sites in existence has continued to rise ever since.

The study also shows that web server software has changed completely since 1995. Back then the NCDA web server dominated with 57 percent market share, followed by CERN with 19 percent share and a newcomer named Apache with 3.5 percent.

Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) launched in February 1996, and by the survey's fifth birthday the server market was largely divided up between Apache and IIS. This month Apache leads with a 60.3 percent market share, with Microsoft at 31 percent and Sun at 1.7 percent.

The news that the 100 million milestone has been surpassed comes in the same week that Tim Berners-Lee expressed concern about the way the Web could be used to spread misinformation.

Talking to the BBC on Thursday, Berners-Lee said he wants to set up a research project to study the social implications of the web's development.